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...We must also accelerate the transformation of our military, which is still configured to fight enemies that no longer exist.

America needs not simply more soldiers but more soldiers with the skills necessary to help friendly governments and their security forces resist common foes. I will create an Army Advisory Corps with 20,000 soldiers to partner with militaries abroad, and I will increase the number of U.S. personnel available to engage in Special Forces operations, civil affairs activities, military policing, and military intelligence. We also need a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse.

Today, understanding foreign cultures is not a luxury but a strategic necessity. As president, I will launch a crash program in civilian and military schools to prepare more experts in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, and Pashto. Students at our service academies should be required to study abroad. I will enlarge the military's Foreign Area Officer program and create a new specialty in strategic interrogation in order to produce more interrogators who can obtain critical knowledge from detainees by using advanced psychological techniques, rather than the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

I will set up a new agency patterned after the erstwhile Office of Strategic Services. A modern-day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare, civil affairs, and psychological warfare; covert-action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines from inside and outside government. Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization. It would fight terrorist subversion around the world and in cyberspace. It could take risks that our bureaucracies today rarely consider taking -- such as deploying infiltrating agents without diplomatic cover in terrorist states and organizations -- and play a key role in frontline efforts to rebuild failed states

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[ 14 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
McCain will be the next president of the United States.

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Snap...
You know, Spector's probably right. WHich is really terrifying.
But you know what, this gave me an image of McCain presidency, and lets say it could resemble that hilarious Cold War movie "Dr.Strangelove".

I imagined McCain, driven by revenge, atop a nuclear bomb dropping from a bomber on Hanoi, in full uniform, yelling "Yeeehaaawww"

quote:

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
McCain will be the next president of the United States.

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Originally posted by Geneva:
well, uh yeah, but how do you say this? :
also re-elected in 2004 ...

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Originally posted by Geneva:
well, uh yeah, but how do you say this? :
also re-elected in 2004 ...

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TO-prof can say, with some justification,:look at the polls 2004 vs 2008.
But I think overall Rice would be a plus for the Mccain campaign for a number of reasons.

In the mean time, the Democrats continue to duke it out...

Say what you will about the virtues of proportionate primary delegate allocation rules in most states under Democratic Party rules, the Republican Party’s winner-take-all rules in most states are going to help the Republicans.

[ 14 February 2008: Message edited by: Sven ]

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Originally posted by contrarianna:
I also think McCain will be pretty much guaranteed a win for at least 3 reasons:
1)The media will be substantially pro-McCain, and the swift boats will fired up when the time is ripe.
2)Additionally, with a largely lobotomized electorate, the cattle prod of atavistic fear can brought into play if needed--people will run to Big Strong Daddy.
3) also, if needed: more "voting irregularities"

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Originally posted by Sven:

Actually, McCain will win if independent voters support him. If not, he won’t. It’s that simple.

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Originally posted by Sven:

Actually, McCain will win if independent voters support him. If not, he won’t. It’s that simple.

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Originally posted by RosaL:
yeah, let's not look too deeply into any of this .... Believe what you're told. Work hard. Buy lots of stuff.

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Originally posted by Slumberjack:
McCain may turn out to be more dangerous to the world than Bush.

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I suppose this was inevitable.

In all of the years Bush has been president, one would have thought that Bush was Satan-on-earth and represented the very pinnacle of pure evil...evilness without parallel in the entire great expanse of infinite time, past and future.

Yet, if McCain wins, we’ll hear that he, beyond all probability and beyond all human understanding of science and art, is actually more evil than Bush!!!

The world is full of miracles, isn’t it?

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Originally posted by Sven:

Well, after the general election, make a point of looking at which candidate most of the independent voters placed their votes with and you will see the winner. Independent voters will determine who the new president will be next January.

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If McCain wins, I wonder how long it will be before Americans pine for the "Good Old Days" of George W. Bush?

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McCain has chaired the International Republican Institute (IRI) since 1993. Ostensibly a non-partisan, democracy-building outfit, in reality the IRI serves as an instrument to advance and promote the most far right Republican foreign policy agenda. More a cloak-and-dagger operation than a conventional research group, IRI has aligned itself with some of the most antidemocratic factions in the Third World.

On the surface at least, IRI seems to have a rather innocuous agenda including party building, media training, the organization of leadership trainings, dissemination of newsletters, and strengthening of civil society. In reality, however, the IRI is more concerned with crushing incipient left movements in Latin America.

One of the least known Washington institutions, IRI receives taxpayer money via the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. A.I.D.). The organization is active in around sixty countries and has a budget of $74 million. On the board of IRI, McCain has been joined by a who's who of Republican bigwigs such as Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick.

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Originally posted by Sven:
I suppose this was inevitable.
In all of the years Bush has been president, one would have thought that Bush was Satan-on-earth and represented the very pinnacle of pure evil...evilness without parallel in the entire great expanse of infinite time, past and future.
Yet, if McCain wins, we’ll hear that he, beyond all probability and beyond all human understanding of science and art, is actually more evil than Bush!!!
The world is full of miracles, isn’t it?
Or, to put it another way, demagoguery is an indispensable tool in the practice of modern-day politics, no?

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Apart from the fire and brimestone, not beyond all probability, but as it turns out, alarmingly possible among an electorate bored with their current choice, yet susceptible to more of the same, but with the unwavering conviction and lustre of a war 'hero.'

[ 14 February 2008: Message edited by: Slumberjack ]

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Originally posted by Sven:

The Nation speculates that McCain will be particularly difficult to beat in the general election if he selects Condi Rice to be his VP running mate. Rice would be a shrewed selection.

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I disagree - apart from the optics of selecting a black woman (thus appealing to disappointed supporters of either Obama or Clinton), Rice offers very little to a Republican ticket.

1. She has no regional ties, and will not help McCain in any particular state. Elections are not about the popular vote, they are about winning 270 electoral college votes (incidentally that is why the Obama electability argument is bunk).

2. She ties McCain excessively to the Bush administration, and its Iraq policy. McCain's policy on Iraq has been tactically (but not strategically) distinct from that of Bush from the beginning - this is a source of some credibility for him (and perhaps the reason he does 10-15 points better than a generic Republican presidential candidate in matchup polls).

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Originally posted by contrarianna:

For the Neoconservatives, however, he is their man.
After Ghouliani dropped out, the Neoconservsative baton passed to McCain--as the most bellicose, imperialistic, Middle East and world-restructuring-by-force candidate.

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: Hartford Courant, February 15, 2008
Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reluctantly acknowledged Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture(...)
"You want to be able to use emergency tech to try to get the information out of that person," Lieberman said. Of course, Lieberman believes such authority has limits. He does not believe the president could authorize having hot coals pressed on someone's flesh to obtain that information.

The difference, he said, is that waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage. "It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological," Lieberman said.(...)

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Hartford Courant article

[ 15 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
McCain's vice-presidential running mate Joseph Liebermann supports "waterboarding"

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From Washingtron Wire, Jan 17: McCain Coy on Lieberman Speculation

There’s been plenty of speculation since self-described Democratic-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman started stumping for Sen. John McCain in December that Al Gore’s 2000 runningmate might reprise that role for his Republican friend.

“He’d be a great partner in any endeavor, including joining America together,” McCain said in response to a question on the Lieberman factor. “Let’s reach across the aisle, let’s work together for America. That’s what Joe Lieberman is all about.”

Lieberman votes with the Democrats in the Senate, but has been a staunch supporter of the Iraq war. He has made appearances with McCain in New Hampshire and Michigan.

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[ 15 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by Parkdale High Park:

There is a considerable distinction I would draw between McCain and most other neo-conservatives. McCain has a much stronger sense of the limits of US power, and his rhetoric, at least, is often tempered with an appeal to the national interest, rather than Bush's often Wilsonian tint.

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Here is one history of McCain's reorientation in an American Conservative article.

But if you wish to take solace in the fact that McCain is not a "pure neocon" think again:
partly disaffected neoconservative Jacob Heilbrunn (whose new book "They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons" is worth a look) claims that McCain's hyper-bellicosity may even outdo and undo the Neocon world-restructuring agenda:

"....The neocons became close to McCain in the 1990s, when they supported American intervention in the Balkans. According to the New Republic's John Judis, the first sign of neocon influence on McCain came in 1999. McCain delivered a speech at Kansas State University in which he touted "national greatness conservatism," arguing: "The United States is the indispensable nation because we have proven to be the greatest force for good in human history." He went on to state that the U.S. should have "every intention of continuing to use our primacy in world affairs for humanity's benefit."

Since then, McCain has, of course, become the most prominent advocate of ramping up the U.S. effort in Iraq, not to mention Sudan and a variety of other hotspots. If McCain becomes president, the neocons will be in charge.

It's no small irony that they may well end up destroying the very American empire they seek to expand, just as the British empire collapsed during the past century."

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Originally posted by josh:
McCain's bad, but he would be better than....

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Originally posted by josh:
He doesn't adopt their theory that democracy, or their version of it, can be imposed, and spread, through military intervention.

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Originally posted by josh:
Raimondo is certainly not the final word on the matter. And my reference to neo-con has nothing to do with domestic matters.

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McCain positioned himself as consistently belligerent, even to Bush's right: in favour of bombing Iran and North Korea. He also proposed a "surge" of troops into Iraq, an idea gleaned from the neocons. If Bush had adopted the Iraq Study Group approach of diplomacy and redeployment, which McCain had assailed as "dispiriting", the right would have hailed McCain as a prophet with honour. However, importuned by the same neocons who had sold it to McCain, Bush seized upon the "surge"...."

[ 15 February 2008: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

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(...)When it comes to suspense and commercial publicity, nobody can beat the U.S. experts. That specialty was used boundlessly to extol prisoner-of-war cases, especially McCain’s.

Following that current, McCain later claimed that the fact that his father was an admiral and commander-in-chief of the U.S. forces in the Pacific led the Vietnamese resistance forces to offer him early release if he admitted to having committed war crimes, which he refused to do, alleging that according to military code, prisoners are freed in the order in which they were captured, and that this meant five years in prison, beatings and torture in an area of the prisoner identified by the U.S. soldiers as the "Hanoi Hilton."

The final withdrawal from Vietnam was disastrous. An army of half a million men, trained and armed to the teeth, could not resist the determination of the Vietnamese patriots. Saigon, the colonial capital, now called Ho Chi Minh city, was abandoned in shame by the occupiers and their accomplices, some of them dangling from helicopters. The United States lost more than 50,000 valuable sons and daughters, without counting the mutilated. They had spent $50 billion on that war without taxes, always disagreeable in and of themselves. Nixon unilaterally renounced the Bretton Woods agreements and created the foundations of the current financial crisis. The only thing they achieved was a candidate for the Republican Party, 41 years later.(...)

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[ 15 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by johnpauljones:

When did McCain announce Lieberman as the running mate?

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Originally posted by Michelle:
In what way is McCain NOT a neo-con?

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Since some previous posters have based their argument on who supports McCain, I would point out that McCain also has the support of the realist (eg. Roosevelt-Eisenhower-Nixon) wing of the GOP.

He was endorsed by Henry Kissinger, and has sought the advice of Brent Scowcroft. His support of the surge, I should add, was not a reflection of hypernationalism, but rather reflects textbook counter-insurgency tactics. If you will forgive a link to Fox News, James Baker (a realist luminary, and opponent of the war), stresses his advocacy for such a strategy here:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,248738,00.html

When McCain talks about the war in Iraq, he isn't talking about glory or democracy. He is talking about the dangers of a mid-east power vacuum that comes to be occupied by Iran (especially likely if the oil-rich Shiite south splits from the rest of Iraq), granting Iran regional hegemony, and considerable leverage in OPEC.

McCain's record on interventions, moreover, is quite mixed. He had personal misgivings about the war in Kosovo, fearing a bloody ground war. He also said this regarding Reagan's deployment to Lebanon:

The fundamental question is "What is the United States' interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the US presence stabilize the region?...

The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.

What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will happen if we stay. I acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
In what way is McCain NOT a neo-con?

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Originally posted by Parkdale High Park:

McCain's record on interventions, moreover, is quite mixed....

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Inexplicably, in order to show McCain's "mixed" record you have chosen to ignore McCain's change over time, and even quote from McCain's early 1983 speech on the US Lebanon presence --from the very article I linked which illustrates that chronological tranformation!American Conservative

You also state:
"When McCain talks about the war in Iraq, he isn't talking about glory or democracy. He is talking about the dangers of a mid-east power vacuum that comes to be occupied by Iran (especially likely if the oil-rich Shiite south splits from the rest of Iraq), granting Iran regional hegemony, and considerable leverage in OPEC...."

Despite the fake altruism in some neoconservative writings about a "new" imperialism bringing democracy by force, that was hardly the main thrust of speeches inciting public support for the Iraq invasion (WMD's)--and likewise the neocons and other rightwingers (including McCain) pushing now for war against Iran and other countries is almost always argued on the alleged "threat". Whatever the revolving "good reasons" for intervention, they all add up to criminal imperialism and resource grabs.

You also state:
"Is he a neoconservative? He probably agrees with them in many respects, but he is also a realist, concerned first and foremost with preserving American national interests, rather than expanding American domination...."

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Originally posted by josh:
He doesn't adopt their theory that democracy, or their version of it, can be imposed, and spread, through military intervention.

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"Dealing with a rising China will be a central challenge for the next American president. Recent prosperity in China has brought more people out of poverty faster than during any other time in human history. China's newfound power implies responsibilities. It raises legitimate expectations that internationally China will behave as a responsible economic partner by developing a transparent code of conduct for its corporations, assuring the safety of its exports, adopting a market approach to currency valuation, pursuing sustainable environmental policies, and abandoning its go-it-alone approach to world energy supplies.

China could also bolster its claim that it is "peacefully rising" by being more transparent about its significant military buildup. When China builds new submarines, adds hundreds of new jet fighters, modernizes its arsenal of strategic ballistic missiles, and tests antisatellite weapons, the United States legitimately must question the intent of such provocative acts. When China threatens democratic Taiwan with a massive arsenal of missiles and warlike rhetoric, the United States must take note. When China enjoys close economic and diplomatic relations with pariah states such as Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, tension will result. When China proposes regional forums and economic arrangements designed to exclude America from Asia, the United States will react."

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
In response to Josh' overly optimistic assessment, check out this piece of saber-rattling from McCain (from the Foreign Afairs essay linked to in the opening post). It comes after similar threats against Iran, Irak, Afghanistan, North Korea...:

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That McCain highlights the rise of China is not sabre-rattling, it is the height of realism, since China is the only prospective existential threat to the United States on the near-term horizon. The rise of China creates a geopolitical situation that has historically led to war - and not minor imperial wars, but great power wars.

Imperialist and later Nazi Germany launched the First and Second World Wars because they feared the economic potential of a rapidly growing Russia/USSR to their east. The Napoleonic wars were pressed on by the British and other conservative powers, who feared the dramatic revival of France under the revolution. The Seven Year's War was pressed by a coalition of France, Russia and Austria, all of which feared a rising Prussia (plus the Austrians wanted Silesia back).

Neoconservatism at its core, is the ideology of an unchallenged superpower. If John McCain believes that China's rise poses an existential threat to the United States, then this requires him to dispense with the notion that the United States lacks a peer competitor (or that the US will lack a peer competitor in the near future). The weak do what they must and the strong do what they can - and this sabre-rattling you point to suggests McCain sees the US as being in the first category.

The first mistake you have made is in assuming that the Americanizing mission of neoconservatism is just window-dressing. There is a REASON many neoconservatives are former Trotskyites - they continue to hold the internationalist perspective of their former selves. Moreover, they have been intermixed over time with anti-detente folks on the right (right wing opponents of Nixon's foreign policy). The tacticians, in the Cold War, were all lined up behind containment, detente and accommodation, because they could do without a transforming mission. The same cannot be said of roll-back advocates.

Why else would neocons also support war in the Balkans (which mainline Republicans, eg. Bush the elder, opposed)? It wasn't like national interests were at stake.

The neoconservative mission of transformative Americanizing of the world represents an optional foreign policy goal. If you believe a rising China menaces US and global security (and that IS a realistic assessment, although an India-China war is the most likely scenario for reasons I would be happy to go into), neocon window-dressing starts to look less appealing.